So, one day in 1990, on his way from Boston to San Francisco for business, Kapor had his private jet touch down at Barlow’s ranch in Pinedale, Wyoming. When they’d finished their powwow, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was born. Soon thereafter John Gilmore, a pioneer at Sun Microsystems, signed on as well, bringing not just deep pockets but a fervent belief in libertarianism. Then they got to work.
But was this just a “hacker defense fund” (as a dumbfounded Wall Street Journal called Kapor’s new project) or a legitimate new group tackling serious constitutional issues? By the end of that year, the trial of a hacker named Craig Neidorf (a/k/a “Knight Lightning”), who was accused of publishing the stolen information about the inner workings of BellSouth’s 911 protocols in his online ’zine, Phrack, erased all doubt. In it, the brains at EFF advised Neidorf’s attorneys and helped assemble witnesses on his behalf, eventually saving him from a 31-year prison sentence — while simultaneously making the feds look like complete and utter rubes.
From that point on the EFF, from its headquarters on Second Street in Cambridge, grew apace. “In the start-up phase, we were very effective at putting questions and issues on the table that had never been articulated,” says Kapor. “For instance, the idea that the Bill of Rights extends into cyberspace, at least for Americans. Nobody had conceived of these issues. Nobody had spoken about issues involving security and computer networks and access and rights and civil liberties in the same sentence. Not the ACLU, they were nowhere. Because this was all strange, technical, not mainstream. They just didn’t know. Nobody knew.”
But within a few years, the EFF’s goals extended a bit beyond their reach. In 1993, they moved their offices to Washington, DC, with an eye to influencing policy right at the source. That was a mistake. “We were organizationally just not up to the challenge,” says Kapor. “We were idealistic and naive. And we wound up getting very burned. So the organization beat a retreat to San Francisco to lick its wounds and gather itself together in the mid ’90s.”
After a years-long interregnum, which Kapor describes as “sort of the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, in which EFF was more marginal, less effective, less clear in its mission and identity, and had multiple near-death experiences,” the renaissance began in earnest. Shari Steele, who had been the junior attorney when the EFF was in Washington, ascended to the executive-director position in 2000. “She renewed its sense of mission and purpose,” says Kapor. “And now it really is following the trajectory of being the ACLU of cyberspace.”
Battle with the RIAA
The EFF subsists entirely on donations. And while its membership of 10,000 or so is leaps and bounds above where it was 15 years ago, it’s still paltry compared with the ACLU’s 400,000 dues-paying members. But with low overhead and a lot of pro bono help, the EFF has influenced a remarkable array of issues.
